I need advice on how to have my C# console application display text to the user through the standard output while still being able access it later on. The actual feature I would like to implement is to dump the entire output buffer to a text file at the end of program execution.
The workaround I use while I don’t find a cleaner approach is to subclass TextWriter overriding the writing methods so they would both write to a file and call the original stdout writer. Something like this:
public class DirtyWorkaround { private class DirtyWriter : TextWriter { private TextWriter stdoutWriter; private StreamWriter fileWriter; public DirtyWriter(string path, TextWriter stdoutWriter) { this.stdoutWriter = stdoutWriter; this.fileWriter = new StreamWriter(path); } override public void Write(string s) { stdoutWriter.Write(s); fileWriter.Write(s); fileWriter.Flush(); } // Same as above for WriteLine() and WriteLine(string), // plus whatever methods I need to override to inherit // from TextWriter (Encoding.Get I guess). } public static void Main(string[] args) { using (DirtyWriter dw = new DirtyWriter('path', Console.Out)) { Console.SetOut(dw); // Teh codez } } } See that it writes to and flushes the file all the time. I’d love to do it only at the end of the execution, but I couldn’t find any way to access to the output buffer.
Also, excuse inaccuracies with the above code (had to write it ad hoc, sorry ;).
The perfect solution for this is to use log4net with a console appender and a file appender. There are many other appenders available as well. It also allows you to turn the different appenders off and on at runtime.